Ordinary Days
by Tez
Summary: A 100story fic table challenge. BrendaxFritz
1. 048 Diamond

A/N: I'm finally doing one of these challenges in the hope that, one of these days, I might actually finish something I start. All of the stories are for the Brenda/Fritz pairing. They're in no particular order and the stories DO NOT follow one another in any sort of timeline.

Also, I'd like to give a big apology to all of my reviewers. Until recently, I had no idea I could respond to reviews, so I missed out on my opportunity to thank all of you!

048.

Diamond

She got to the crime scene three hours after Gabriel had called to inform her that Priority Homicide had a new case. Provenza and Flynn cracked a few mostly-good-natured jokes about her late arrival, but she ignored them as usual, inspecting every inch of the blood-soaked alley with her usual aplomb before assigning duties to the squad. She watched them carefully for their reactions as she gestured to the paint transfer on the brick wall and the partial footprint next to the car's rear tire. Her male detectives seemed uniformly clueless, but she saw Daniels do a surreptitious double-take when the high-powered crime scene lights glinted off of the diamond on her left hand. The younger woman said nothing, however, and she'd almost made it back to her car before a tentative hand on her shoulder stopped her.

"Chief?"

She turned.

"Yes, Sergeant Gabriel?"

Gabriel glanced back toward the crime scene, and she followed his gaze to find the entire squad watching them, their expressions ranging from Tao's gleeful grin to Provenza's wry amusement to Daniels' quiet approval.

"We just wanted to say congratulations. To you and Agent Howard."

For the first time since she'd arrived at the scene, she let herself smile.


	2. 033 Too Much

033.

Too Much.

"You have one new message."

Brenda leaned wearily against the counter, taking a large swallow of merlot as the message played.

"Brenda, it's Fritz. You're not answering your cell phone. I'm just calling to make sure everything was okay. Call me back."

"Make me," she muttered defiantly, slapping at the 'stop' button on the machine even as she realized how ridiculous she was being. He was her boyfriend and she hadn't spoken to him in two days. Of course he wanted her to call. She couldn't help feeling trapped, though. He'd left messages on her cell phone, her home phone, and even at the squad room. He'd _shown up_ in the squad room looking for her, for heaven's sake. She'd been out at the crime scene with Gabriel, so Provenza had promised to tell her that Fritz had been by, and then he and Flynn had proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon making jokes about the FBI agent's lovesick obsession with her.

She'd tried to ignore them, since that was the only tactic that worked when the two of them got going, but it was substantially more difficult to ignore their jests when part of her agreed with them. She liked Fritz – maybe even more than liked him – but she couldn't shake the feeling that he needed more than she could give him.

The phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. She let the machine pick it up, and winced at the familiar voice coming through the little speaker.

"Brenda, it's Fritz." He paused. "Look, Brenda, I'm sorry. I know I've been…persistent, lately. I don't want to crowd you. I just…I miss you. But I get the feeling that maybe all of this is just too much for you, so…" He sighed. "So I'm going to stop. You can call me, or not. You know how to reach me."

The click that signaled the end of the message sounded impossibly loud to her, and the phone was actually in her hand before she realized what she was doing. If she called him now and apologized, she'd be simply reacting to a choice he'd already made, and sacrificing her own ability to choose in the process. She'd done the same thing throughout her relationship with Will. If she wanted this relationship to be different, then she'd have to start making her own choices. Fritz was right; this _was_ too much for her. She needed to do this on her own terms.

"Tomorrow," she declared aloud, testing the idea. "I'll call him tomorrow and ask him to dinner."

It sounded good. It sounded like a choice; like an action, not a reaction. And while it wasn't a very big step, it was, she realized, at least a step in the right direction.


	3. 011 Red

A/N: Okay, there are going to be a hundred of these, and I can't see subjecting the people who have me on author alert to a hundred alerts for a fandom most of them don't read, so I'm going to stop posting them here. If you want to keep reading them, contact me via review and I'll let you know where you can find them. Also, this story may need a hankie alert if you are particularly sniffle-prone. Fair warning!

011.

Red.

Who wears a red tie to a funeral?

She'd asked him exactly that question six months ago, when a widely-disliked city official had passed away and Fritz had drawn the FBI's short straw and gotten stuck having to represent his department at the service. She'd offered to go with him, and when she'd come out of the bedroom dressed in her nicest black suit, she'd been horrified to find him wearing a black suit of his own paired with a _red _tie. She'd scolded him, informing him firmly that it was the utter pinnacle of tackiness to wear anything red to a funeral, and that even if Satan himself had passed away, the appropriate tie color would still be black. Her mother, she'd insisted, would absolutely die if she heard about this. He'd laughed but acquiesced, removing the tie obediently and allowing her to replace it with a somber black one.

"Fair enough," he'd told her. "But I'm wearing that tie to _my_ funeral. Nobody can complain that it's tacky if the dead guest-of-honor is wearing it."

She'd scolded him again, this time for cracking such a morbid joke at such an inappropriate time, and with one last amused smile he'd changed the topic. She hadn't known that she'd ever think of that particular conversation again.

She hadn't known that, six months later, Fritz would be standing in line at the grocery store at one in the morning because they'd run out of eggnog and she'd insisted that they couldn't finish decorating the tree without it, and that, while he was pulling out his wallet and chatting with the cashier about the unseasonably warm weather, three teenagers high on crystal meth would try to rob the store.

She hadn't known that there would be a thirty-two-year-old mother of four standing in line behind him, or that when the shooting started he would tackle the woman to the floor, shielding her from the bullets even as three of them hit him squarely in the back. She hadn't known that there would be a knock at her door an hour later, just after she'd started to worry about Fritz, or that Daniels and Gabriel would be standing teary-eyed on her doorstep, charged with the unenviable task of having to tell her that the man she loved was dead.

She hadn't known that, in the middle of making the funeral arrangements, she'd remember that conversation about the tie, or that she'd insist over the protestations of the funeral home directors that he had to wear that awful red tie for the funeral. She hadn't known that she'd be sitting rigidly during the service, her mother on one side and Fritz's estranged sister on the other and the rest of the room filled to bursting with federal agents and LAPD officers and all the other people whose lives he'd touched, or that her mind would be completely occupied with that damned tie because if she let herself think about anything else, about the pain or the fear or the anger or the despair that had wrapped itself around the empty place in her heart and refused to let go, she'd start to cry and she'd never be able to stop.

So she sat, hands clenched tightly in her lap, as the FBI regional director gave a long-winded speech about Fritz's accomplishments that Fritz would have hated, and she kept staring straight ahead as her mother gave her arm a gentle pat and Ilsa wept silently next to her, and she wondered what strange twist of fate would have led her to fall in love with a man who would wear a red tie to his own funeral.


End file.
